"What are you talking about?"
Suzuki Sonoko looked at the two detectives' strange expressions and went around to inspect the back of the stools too. "Hm? Aren't these the two names that were on the door frame earlier?"
Jiang Xia nodded and briefly told her about the chairs in the dining room.
Suzuki Sonoko scratched at her Hairpin, suddenly thinking of something. She looked at the round stool with "kachan" written on the back. "She didn't have a seat in the dining room, but she did in the kitchen... Could this 'kachan' be the mayor's maid? 'Maid' starts with 'ma,' and they spend a lot of time in the kitchen too."
Hattori Heiji rubbed his chin. "But children usually copy the way other adults address people. The adults in her family wouldn't just call the maid 'maid,' would they? They should have had some other name for her."
Jiang Xia walked over to the other round stool and held the light closer. "There seems to be other writing on the back of this stool marked 'chioni.'"
"!" Hattori Heiji and Conan leaned in for a closer look. Sure enough, beneath "chioni" was a faded line of writing that had been covered up—"dojiousan."
Just like the "chan" in kachan, san was a form of address. And that dojio before it...
"Could this be referring to a loach?" Conan suddenly remembered something. "When we searched the First Floor earlier, Xiao Du had drawn a long thing on chioni's room door. I thought it was an eel at the time. But if it was a loach..."
"What a mess." Suzuki Sonoko's head started to ache whenever she heard word puzzles. Whenever she read mystery novels in the past, she would skip the riddles and go straight to the romantic scenes where the hero